We've gotten a bunch of notes over the past week for the DayZ Modification for Arma II, Bohemia Interactive Studios' military shooter sequel (thanks LittleMe and Slippery_Jim). The requirements call for Arma II: Combined Operations, as Arma 2 free does not support modifications. Here's word on the mod's zombie-killing action:

Realistic "Zombies" with custom animations - These once human creatures will act and behave as if they have a heighten sense of hearing and smell but less sight, on top of that they use motion captured animations such as walking and eating from your unconscious body. If you look into any built up area you'll see them walking around waiting for their next victim which dares to venture in.

New weapons and vehicles! - Ever felt like you needed a Crossbow? Or maybe a less military like weapon? If you have then this is perfect for you as we have both of these created to high quality standards all ready for your use in this wasteland. On top of that you can even pick up the bolts fired from the Crossbow to reuse! Not only that we also have created custom vehicles which can be repaired and ridden around to show the world what you're made of!

Dmitri_M wrote on May 16, 2012, 12:26:If you're providing a mainstream out of the box experience like Dice are with BF3 I can see why they don't bother with mod tools. Lost DLC revenue versus a couple of happy modders. If you couldn't mod ArmA, the game would sell zero.

I thought that was because they said modders were too stupid to make mods for BF3.

As for lost DLC, this game at least is making it up for sales of the original game. You can see how much demand there is for sandbox type games by how this has shot to the top of steam (and its not currently on sale). Interestingly there are some parallels with minecraft (open world, night is terrifying, sandbox type game although without building). This is not a new phenomena, people used to buy Half life so they could get the free CS or TFC mods. Building a large loyal community can be more important than the sales of the initial product. Look at valve. CS became the most popular PC multiplayer FPS game ever, and arguably had a big role in how steam came about and became such a success. CS (either flavor) is STILL one of the most popular steam games (by number of players):http://store.steampowered.com/stats/?snr=1_4_4__10